Progress or deception?
Muse #212 - the illusions of change...
I recently talked about my experiences with how I bought and installed my new dishwasher in a single day. Here my dishwashing tales continue…
I ran my first load of dishes and they came out being very wet. I checked the settings and it seemed like I had forgotten to set the heated dry on.
My next load ran in Low Heat dry settings to similar results. The dishes were still wet.
Perhaps the third time is a charm with the High Heat settings. And no luck at all still.
And frustrating four loads later with both High Heat settings on and the Extra Dry option turned on led to no more changes in the results. Wet dishes again. These experiments have now consumed three days with no improvement in sight.
What was I doing wrong? Some googling and reading suggested that perhaps the dryer vent was blocked. I checked these and they seemed quite okay. And after reading the user manual (I feel unmanly now), the various support blogs, and reviews on this particular model of the dishwasher, I finally figured it out…
It was the lack of use of rinse and dry aid. But wait a minute, for the last 12 years my previous dishwasher was just fine with the use of pods that already had some dry aid in them. I had not been adding rinse and drying aid fluid to my dishwasher, since ever - my 15 years in Canada. So, why now? Which led me back to more reading on the subject.
It seems that to meet the new energy star requirements, the heating element wattage had been reduced in newer models needing the use of the rinse/dry aid. Ha. What an answer.
My next two loads with rinse/drying aid added to the chamber brought out perfectly dry dishes. But, the sorry state of affairs means that in order to meet the new “regulation” something had been taken out by the manufacturer. To save me $25-30 per year in electricity charges, now I have to spend $40 a year in rinse/drying aid which I was not using before. Added to the cost are the additional chemicals that are being used on the dishes, as well as stuff that is going to be flushed/evaporated out into the environment.
Reminded me of the VW car’s diesel scam. The way their engines were built to work in test environments to meet the right regulated levels of NO2 emissions and with 40 times the emission in real life when the cars were driven on the road.
I am still scratching my head over this. Is this progress or a retrograde step? Regulations drive behavior at what cost? Both monetary and environmental? The lack of systemic thinking to problem-solving really boggles the mind. It is all the case of “Rob Peter to pay Paul”